Jeff Merkley

You cannot have people out there who have served this country, you cannot have workers who have helped to build this country strong, that all of a sudden because of inaction we slash their benefits by 20 percent.

Why should a working person pay a higher marginal tax rate than the rich?

If we are getting $17 back for every dollar we put in, maybe there would be bipartisan support for that kind of smart investment.

I understand that the House has said that they do not want to do that and there has got to be more reforms.

I want to applaud you and the President for laying out a vision that changes the path our nation is on right now.

Some of that wasteful spending in tax giveaways needs to be adjusted for a fundamental issue of fairness

We need to make at least two years of community college universally available and this is a critical step in terms of doing it.

Something that has really struck me and certainly resonated in my town halls across Oregon is the low percent of our GDP that we are investing in infrastructure.

The numbers I have generally seen, but I have a feeling you have better, more detailed insights on this, is that the U.S. is now spending less than 2 percent of our GDP on infrastructure, that Europe is spending 5 percent, that China is…

Not only does it represent a direct threat, but it represents what could be the start of a nuclear arms race.

The last thing we want is for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Thank you, Mr. President. With Senator Mary Landrieu's permission, I want to do a quick interlude to send a bill over to the House. ____________________

I am out of time. So many questions, so little time. Thank you all very much.

Yes, fair point, Deborah. But, even with low downpayment loans, the downpayment and the closing costs together can still be a substantial hurdle to undertake.

To help empower home ownership among lower-income families.

I think we spent about $70 billion on the mortgage interest deduction.

I would certainly encourage you to actually look at these externalities seriously.

I would rather see a class of professional regulators very well trained and very well incentivized to do that which is right rather than just be paid on time and grade.

People really respond to incentives, and so one of the problems of Government service in an agency like the Federal Reserve is frequently that you get paid by grade and time served and not by your performance.

If we need the expertise that comes from having been in these sophisticated transactions in order to understand and regulate them, how do you pull people--would you be able to recruit the expertise needed if you had a 3-year restriction on…

I think it takes Congress to do something like that.

I think the current law is not effective in accomplishing what it set out to accomplish.

It seems to me on that third point that the best--the very good examiners are going to need that.

I wanted to go back to the challenge of regulatory capture.

There is something fundamentally wrong with it, apart from safety and soundness, which is essentially a monopoly control or influence that raises the price of the end product.